"To be compelled to drop it again before we have gone a hundred yards?"
"No, to drop it when we have reached the gate. Won't you, please? I don't deny that I am a fool. I have always been a fool. My father said so and he was right. Everybody made fun of me because I was so easily cheated; and you ought to be willing to forgive a man who was born a failure. Whenever there has been a mistake to be made I have made it. Once I was caught in a storm and when I came in dripping, my father said that I hadn't sense enough to come in out of the rain. But I am stronger with every one else than I am with you, and——"
She was laughing at me; but it was a laugh of sympathy, of forgiveness, and I caught her hand and placed it upon my arm. And so we walked along in silence, she pressing my arm when the road was rough. Daylight was coming and we could see the house, dark and lonesome beyond the black ravine.
"What a peculiar man the General is," I said, feeling the growing heaviness of the silence. "I can hardly place him; but I believe he has a kind heart."
"Yes," she replied, "he is kind and brave and generous, but over it all is a weakness."
"And he is of a type that is fast disappearing," said I. "A few years more and his class will be but a memory, and then will come almost a forgetfulness, but later on he will reappear as a caricature from the pen of some careless and unsympathetic writer."
We had crossed the ravine and were now at the gate, and here I halted. "What, aren't you going in?" she asked, looking up at me, and in the dim light I could see her face, pale and sad.
"No," I answered, "I am going to town."
"At this hour, and when you are so tired?"
"The horse is rested, and as for myself, my duty must give me vigor."